The topics and the relevance assessments of the tasks shortly described below can be obtained from the download area.

Tasks in CLEF-IP 2013

  • Passage retrieval starting from claims (patentability or novelty search) : The topics in this task will be based on the claims in patent application documents. Given a claim, the participants will be asked to retrieve relevant documents in the collection and mark out the relevant passages in these documents.
    This task is very similar to the one organized in 2012. As background data for the topics, data that can be used in query generation, participants will be given patent documents that are members of the patent family claims' application document.
    More on this task is available on the task's page, further detailed information can be found here.

  • Text to image/image to text : Given a patent application document - as an XML file - and the set of images occurring in the application, extract the links between the image labels and the text pointing to the object of the image label.

  • Structure Recognition Task : The topics in this third task are patent images representing flow-charts. Participants in this task will be asked to extract the information in these images and return it in a predefined textual format.
    The task is similar to the one organized in 2012. This year we added images with more challenging cases of flow-charts, namely those containing metanodes.

Tasks in CLEF-IP 2012

  • Passage retrieval starting from claims (patentability or novelty search) : The topics in this task are based on the claims in patent application documents. Given a claim, the participants will be asked to retrieve relevant documents in the collection and mark out the relevant passages in these documents.
    More on this task is available on the task's page.

  • Flowchart Recognition Task: The topics in this third task are patent images representing flow-charts. Participants in this task will be asked to extract the information in these images and return it in a predefined textual format.

  • Chemical Structure Recognition Task: The topics in this fourth task will be patent pages in TIFF format. Participants will be asked to identify the location of the chemical structures depicted on these pages and, for each of them, return the corresponding structure in a MOL file (a chemical structure file format).

Tasks in CLEF-IP 2011

There were four tasks in the 2011 track:

  • Prior Art Candidate Search: Find patent documents that are likely to constitute prior art to a given patent application.
  • Classification: Classify a given patent document according to the IPC system, up to the subclass level. A new optional sub-task is to classify a given patent document up to the group/subgroup level, when the subclass is given.
  • Image-based Patent Retrieval: Find patent documents relevant to a given patent document containing images.
  • Image-based Classification: Categorize given patent images into pre-defined categories of images (such as graph, flowchart, drawing, etc.).

Tasks in CLEF-IP 2010

  • Prior Art Candidate Search Task: find patent documents that are likely to constitute prior art to a given patent application.
  • Classification Task: classify a given patent document according to the IPC.

Both tasks contained 2000 topics, participants to the Prior Art task were allowed to submit results for a smaller topic set of 500 topics.

Tasks in CLEF-IP 2009

There was only one kind of task: find documents that constitute prior art. 10.000 topics were made available, participants could choose to submit experiments using subsets of the largest topic set. Accepted subsets had to contain results for the first 500, 1000, or 5000 topics out of the complete set.

The language of the topic documents was not restricted. The 2009 track also made available optional language tasks for English, German and French, where the topics had textual content in one of the three languages, only.